


Five Times Barry Saw Iris Naked

by gnimaerd



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 10:49:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2505128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimaerd/pseuds/gnimaerd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The clue is in the title. <i>The next time there is no blood or screaming, there's no faulty motel bathroom door, and it's not an accident, all of which are good things.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Barry Saw Iris Naked

 

 

**One:**

 

When Barry is fourteen, he walks in on Iris in the shower. She has, for some reason, forgotten to lock the bathroom door, and he has earbuds in – doesn't hear the water running. A perfect, humiliating storm ensues.

 

She screams, he screams, she exits the shower in a flail of wet, naked limbs grabbing frantically for a towel and he exits the bathroom at a blind run, straight into the open door of the linen closet. The skin over his left eyebrow splits open and a deep, bruising pain seers his forehead – he finds himself on his back, blood trickling in his eyes and onto the carpet, Iris standing over him in a towel asking if he's okay.

 

He's not okay. He has to be taken to the ER, receives three stitches for his trouble, and can't look Iris in the eye for the next week.

 

She had _boobs_. And okay he kind of knew she had boobs already, he's – you know. Seen her. Around the house. Wearing t-shirts and blouses that sort of strain now in ways they didn't six months ago, ways he's both fascinated and horrified by. And also he's had to get used to her bras – bras of a sort she also definitely didn't have six months ago – in the dryer with his boxers and how that whole idea of their underwear touching makes him feel a whole load of weird all over and he isn't sure exactly why except that he's been having these dreams about her lately that are just – _wow._

 

And – and – she had _hair._ In her – you know – _area_. (Which he absolutely attempted to avoid looking at). He doesn't even have hair, for god's sake! He checks, fairly regularly, but – actually it'll be another year before anything truly like puberty happens to Barry Allen.

 

***

**Two:**

 

The next time is really only a glimpse – it's their last summer before college, and they're road tripping down to Atlanta to visit some obscure West relations, sharing a motel room (twin beds), with Joe across the hall. Normally Iris would be the one with her own room, but Joe has a cold that's been making him snore like a dying elephant, and Iris insists she doesn't mind sharing with Barry so –

 

Iris is changing into her pyjamas in the bathroom, but the catch on the door is kind of faulty so it keeps clicking open, hanging ajar. It only really reveals a sliver of the bathroom, a slice of the mirror – not the shower or the toilet or anything that would make it weird, though, so by their second hour in the room they've both given up wedging the damn thing closed. It makes it easier to talk while they get ready for bed.

 

Barry lounges on his assigned bed and glances up from the TV – he's commentating some hilariously god awful infomercial to Iris – and he sees her bare back pass by the bathroom door, and realises she's probably naked in there and suddenly he can't breathe.

 

She has the most beautiful back he's ever seen, though. He catches the slight curve of her hip, a moment later, and feels dirty for even looking – spying – even though she knows the door's open –

 

But she's Iris and she's so beautiful, and he's just kinda transfixed by hint of her shoulder blades –

 

Years later (on their honeymoon, actually), she tells him that she knew he was watching – let him watch – stood still in the bathroom and kind of _listened_ to him watching her? She thought about the strange, prickling sensation it gave her, to feel like they were colluding on this one moment they shouldn't have been sharing. Ten feet and one slightly open door apart from each other.

  
“I had this weird moment where I wanted to just walk out of the bathroom naked, to see what you'd do.”

 

That idea is... kind of glorious, actually. “Oh my god, why didn't you?”

 

“I don't know. I was scared, I guess.”

“Of me?”

 

“No. Just. In general. I was still a virgin – I'd been thinking about that a lot at the time – I wasn't sure what I was doing with my sexuality, with my body – I was just. Trying to figure stuff out. And I kind of wanted you but I didn't want to want you. And I kept thinking about how maybe losing my virginity to you wouldn't be scary. But also it would have been, I don't know... The thought of sleeping with you just opened up something in my head that I wasn't ready to explore.”

 

Barry thinks for a moment about that and decides to ask her about it later.

 

“What would you have done? If I'd have come out there naked?”

 

“Fainted.”

 

She laughs into his shoulder, but he's really not kidding.

 

***

 

**Three:**

The next time there is no blood or screaming, there's no faulty motel bathroom door, and it's not an accident, all of which are good things.

 

It's also all really uncharacteristically quiet – they've totally stopped talking, for like a minute now – just trading shallow breaths and skirting fingers over thin layers of clothing and exposed patches of soft skin, daring each other, waiting, perilously, perched on the very edge of this – whatever it is. And Barry feels sick, mostly because Iris is in his lap, taking her top off, and he's touching her with hands that won't stop shaking, and her lace bra doesn't really cover anything and he can see her nipples through it and they're hard and dark and somehow vulnerable and adorable and –

 

Simultaneously he's also having inconveniently vivid recollections about that time he cracked his head off the linen closet door. He still has a faint scar just over one eyebrow, which she kisses a moment later and he realises she might be thinking about that whole awful shower incident too and – this isn't doing anything for his nerves.

 

They're not really a pet-name type couple – not in public – but she calls him 'baby' for the first time that night, softly, sweetly, as she pulls him into her and he mumbles her name against her neck. She whispers _okay, baby, oh god –_ and he nearly comes right there.

 

In the morning, he pulls the covers back off the bed, so he can look at her – just... look.

 

She's so beautiful without her clothes, there, amongst the crumpled sheets – and when she yawns and blinks and wakes up and smiles at him, he has a flash (hah!) of all the ways in which he absolutely doesn't deserve this moment and feels incredible, ridiculous gratitude.

 

Then she smacks him in the face with a pillow.

 

“I'm cold, you jerk!”

 

“Sorry – sorry!”

 

He pulls the bedclothes back up over them again, kisses her goosebumps better.

 

***

  
**Four:  
**

She holds out one arm to him, and he slides down onto her body, explores every inch of her with his mouth – with his tongue (he's working out this whole vibration situation, it gets better every time they try it).

 

She's so impossibly perfect. He likes her collarbones and her belly button, he likes the little mole on her left hip and the birthmark – a patch of slightly darker skin in the shape of maybe an upside down map of texas – just under one of her shoulder-blades. He likes the silvery stretch marks just visible on her hips, though she gets self-conscious and bats his hands away when he grazes his fingertips over them.

 

“Why do you like those so much? They're gross, stop it.”

 

“Nothing about you is gross. You're perfect. All of you – all of this is perfect.” He plants little kisses on her thighs, on her stretch marks, careful, reverent.

 

She's propped herself up on her elbows to look at him, her expression momentarily unreadable. The only light in the room - his room, in his tiny studio - is from the street lights outside and the occasional passing car throwing bright white against the wall – and abruptly she sits up and turns on the bedside lamp, flooding the room with honey-yellow, making him blink and screw up his eyes. It's only really the the third week of their official relationship, which he knows because the one month anniversary is next week and he's been trying to decide whether he should bring that up - whether getting her something (something nice, you know, small, but personal, not too flashy, but meaningful - somehow) would seem romantic or whether it'd be kinda weird or needy or pathetic. 

Point is: they haven't totally found their comfort zone yet. They're working their way toward it, rapidly, but the first fresh flush of this has started to wear off and the reality is setting in and reality can be scary sometimes. There's a lot between them, already. So much that taking it all in at once would be paralyzing. So they're careful. He hasn't said 'I love you' since his first tumbling, desperate confession. She hasn't raised it.

Still it comes out in other ways and there it is, between them, on the bed now, as Iris draws her knees up to her chest and looks at him over the top of her legs and smiles this small, hesitant little smile.

 

“You really mean that, huh?” 

 

“Yeah,” of course he does. 

 

She smiles again, in that small, hesitant way. Not an expression she uses often. It's a vulnerable look – one she will only ever use in private, with him – the way she'll keep calling him _baby_ , when it's just them, together – that word is just for him, that look is just for him.

 

“You're not so bad yourself, you know that?” She reaches for him, and he crawls up the bed to kiss her.

 

“Oh, yeah, I'm a god. You're a lucky woman.”

 

She giggles, and he feigns offence, and she kisses him again, pulling him on top of her.

 

They finish having sex with the lights on.

 

***  
  
 **Five:**  
She pulls off her dress and maybe it's just the angle or something, maybe because she's been away for ten days and he hasn't really seen her in that time but – _wow_ she looks pregnant.

 

Incredible, and pregnant.

 

Well – he knew she was pregnant. She's four months along. She spent six weeks puking every hour of every day and her breasts went up two cup sizes in a month – there was no mistaking that she was pregnant.

 

But she didn't have that much of a bump, he could swear. It was kind of there – she was dressing around it, lots of loose, flowing tops which mostly hid any change – and he'd run his hands over her abdomen and feel the difference, look at her side ways and see the hint of it, but... visually it wasn't _that_ pronounced.

 

Now though - well. Yeah. Wow.

 

“There's definitely a fetus in here, huh?” Iris grabs his hand to place it against where she's round and swollen. (In two weeks they're going for an ultrasound where it will turn out that actually there's more than one fetus in there, which kind of explains where the belly's coming from so quickly. But neither of them know that yet).

 

Barry is sitting on the edge of their bed and she nudges his knees apart to stand between them, not wearing anything – unselfconscious.

 

Barry lays his forehead against her breasts (also kind of swollen, he notices), and cradles her abdomen with his hands and feels like this is something holy.

 

“How's it feel?”

 

“Kinda big,” as she talks, she's running her fingers absently through his hair, tweaking his ears, “been noticing it a lot more the last few days – I think I popped.”

“Yeah,” he grazes his fingers over her naval, glances up at her, wondering and warm. “It's incredible. You're incredible.”

 

“Don't get soft on me, baby,” she tips his chin back to look at him, her eyes bright.

 

“Well, it is, and you are.”

 

He feels her smile against his mouth when she kisses him.

 

“I think I felt it moving – the other day – but... I don't know.”

“Wait, seriously?”

“I think - maybe,” she shrugs, goes back to petting him, “the books say not to expect movement for another couple of weeks, but... pretty sure I felt something, you know? Either way I bet it'll start really kicking soon."

"You reckon?"

"Mmhm. Mother's intuition." 

"Can you have that already?"

"Well I gotta have something to compensate for the lack of caffeine and cocktails and sushi."

Barry grins, still wondering, then leans down and plants a kiss just above her belly button – begins to trail his mouth up, toward her breasts. When he slips one gentle hand between her legs, catches at one of her nipples with his teeth, he feels Iris exhale, softly, cradling the back of his head with her hands.

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Five Times Barry Saw Iris Naked [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9163561) by [bessyboo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessyboo/pseuds/bessyboo)




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